So I have been advised (by my dear brother) that I should include more "cute stories" about my son"s bilingualism, so that my stories become less academic and more digestable for the "casual surfer" (thanks for the tip, A.)
So here is the "cute story" for this week:
We have a book at home for teaching the alphabet to Russian children and my son really likes looking at it with his dad. It has a mascot for every letter, which normally starts with the first letter, or looks like the letter somehow. So the mascot for the letter "C" (which is the Russian "s") is a "собака" (pronounced "sobaka"i.e. a dog.)
Now whenever we are out and about and my son sees a "C" (the other day he got really excited by three Cs at once(!!) on the side of a car of the "City car club") he points to it, gets all excited and says "Hund!!!" (which is German for "dog")
If you didn't know his particular background, you'd really have no chance of understanding where on earth he came up with that particular association!
I thought about saying, well, yes, but no, cos that's actually a "c" and not an "s" because this is Mama's letter and not Papa's letter. But then I dropped that line of arguing and said, yes, that's true, that letter is for dog. Well done!
(I think it is maybe a bit too early to explain that Mama uses different letters from Papa!)
Monday, 30 January 2012
Friday, 27 January 2012
A little exercise in fluency...
I am reading Francois Grosjean's 2010 book called "Bilingual: Life and Reality" and he distinguishes between language fluency and language use in order to get a better picture of a particular bilingual's language "competence". I thought I would try doing this for myself (which is accurate at this moment in time!) I often get asked how many languages I speak, and I often answer "it depends what you mean by 'speak'"? Anyway, the answer is six, but as you can see from the chart above, I hardly use three of them, and their fluency is therefore quite low. But all of these change, depending on where I am, so this is only ever going to be a snapshot of my language use and fluency at a particular point in my life.
My Hungarian would move up or down and left to right depending on how much I go to Hungary and how much I interact with Hungarians, (and how much Hungarian radio I listen to!)
My English and German are right up there at the moment, as I speak them both daily now, but this has also been very different in the past.
Anyway, this is just a fun exercise and I encourage others to try it for themselves!
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Bilinguals, poor people and women...
In a class he teaches on Bilingualism here at Edinburgh University, Professor Joseph Gafaranga recently said "People do not generally become bilingual by being born of linguists." I thought that was a great comment, and said I would quote him on it!
If you go to conferences on Bilingualism, or if you read the research into it, you might get the impression that most bilingual children have parents who are linguists.
So much of the pioneering literature in the field was written by researchers reporting on their own children's development (and clearly there are huge practical advantages for this, but there is the problem of the Observer's Paradox - can we really objectively observe ourselves?).
Yet worldwide the majority of children become bilingual because they grow up in multilingual societies. Relatively little research has been done on these populations. Again this is due to resources and the fact that most research happens in the Western world. But we should be aware of this discrepancy, before making too broad generalistaions from the research that we do have.
To quote another person who recently said something to me that made me laugh: when speaking with my friend Thoko about biases in research, she said "Yes, poor people and women have known about that for a long time!"
If you go to conferences on Bilingualism, or if you read the research into it, you might get the impression that most bilingual children have parents who are linguists.
So much of the pioneering literature in the field was written by researchers reporting on their own children's development (and clearly there are huge practical advantages for this, but there is the problem of the Observer's Paradox - can we really objectively observe ourselves?).
Yet worldwide the majority of children become bilingual because they grow up in multilingual societies. Relatively little research has been done on these populations. Again this is due to resources and the fact that most research happens in the Western world. But we should be aware of this discrepancy, before making too broad generalistaions from the research that we do have.
To quote another person who recently said something to me that made me laugh: when speaking with my friend Thoko about biases in research, she said "Yes, poor people and women have known about that for a long time!"
Monday, 23 January 2012
Some bilinguals are "better" than others
So if it is rare to actually find someone who really is "equally competent" in both languages, (not at least because it is hard to know how we should measure "equal competence" in the first place), then what about situations in which people are perceived and perhaps even perceive themselves to be equally bad in both their languages? And what makes speakers feel that they are bad at their own language(s) anyway?
In Germany this subject comes up when discussing issues of alleged "ghettoization" in city schools (especially in Berlin), where large numbers of (mainly) Turkish immigrants live in close-knit communities, and where local schools have large numbers of pupils from Turkish descent. The claim is that some children of these immigrant communities can speak neither German or Turkish "properly" and are therefore doomed to a life with very limited options and not much mobility.
I'm sure similar claims are made about Hispanic communities in the US - or any other larger migrant group worldwide for that matter. Clearly, however, these second generation immigrants can speak and communicate with each other fine. It is not that they somehow are "semilingual" and can't communicate successfully. They aren't cognitively impaired in any way. If you go along to a school in Berlin, you will see kids talking away quite happily. A native German speaker, and a native Turkish speaker may not recognise whatever these kids are speaking as constituting proper German or Turkish, and they may perceive their speaking as constituting a kind of "substandard" language. But why substandard if they are communicating effectively with one another? What is substandard about it?
The question then is, what are they talking? Not having studied the way these children talk, I can't actually say. It is probably some new Berlin dialect. It is only when Turkish or German speakers hear it that it appears as "bad" German or "bad" Turkish.
The response by schools has often been to discourage the use of Turkish at home and to discourage the use of Turkish in the playgrounds. But I think this completely misses the point.The problem is not that these children have Turkish at home, or that they speak Turkish with one another. They should speak whatever they want with one another.
The point is that they need sufficient input and tuition in standard German, and this is the school's responsibility. Schools need to offer specialised formal tuition in standard German for migrant children rather than expect them to acquire the standard version of the language by themselves. Where will they learn it if their social network is not made up of speakers of the standard variety?
If we want children to become literate in the standard language, then we have to provide the facilities and the means to do it. Banning the home language is not the way to do this. Of course offering a good language programme is a question of money and resources, and clearly there is not enough money for this kind of thing. But "integration" (another favourite word in this debate) is a two-way process. And the majority language has to come from the majority. Discouraging the minority language is actually irrelevant in this process, and also symbolically de-values this community's language.
It just made me think that there are some forms of bilingualism that are seen very positively (like my own), and others that are seen quite negatively (for example in migrant contexts). Schools in the UK, for example, offer French or German as a foreign language, rather than languages that are actually spoken in the community (say Urdu or Polish). So there is a definite ranking of languages in order of perceived value or utility. Some forms of bilingualism are seen as really advantageous, whilst others are seen as harmful and hindering successful "integration".
In Germany this subject comes up when discussing issues of alleged "ghettoization" in city schools (especially in Berlin), where large numbers of (mainly) Turkish immigrants live in close-knit communities, and where local schools have large numbers of pupils from Turkish descent. The claim is that some children of these immigrant communities can speak neither German or Turkish "properly" and are therefore doomed to a life with very limited options and not much mobility.
I'm sure similar claims are made about Hispanic communities in the US - or any other larger migrant group worldwide for that matter. Clearly, however, these second generation immigrants can speak and communicate with each other fine. It is not that they somehow are "semilingual" and can't communicate successfully. They aren't cognitively impaired in any way. If you go along to a school in Berlin, you will see kids talking away quite happily. A native German speaker, and a native Turkish speaker may not recognise whatever these kids are speaking as constituting proper German or Turkish, and they may perceive their speaking as constituting a kind of "substandard" language. But why substandard if they are communicating effectively with one another? What is substandard about it?
The question then is, what are they talking? Not having studied the way these children talk, I can't actually say. It is probably some new Berlin dialect. It is only when Turkish or German speakers hear it that it appears as "bad" German or "bad" Turkish.
The response by schools has often been to discourage the use of Turkish at home and to discourage the use of Turkish in the playgrounds. But I think this completely misses the point.The problem is not that these children have Turkish at home, or that they speak Turkish with one another. They should speak whatever they want with one another.
The point is that they need sufficient input and tuition in standard German, and this is the school's responsibility. Schools need to offer specialised formal tuition in standard German for migrant children rather than expect them to acquire the standard version of the language by themselves. Where will they learn it if their social network is not made up of speakers of the standard variety?
If we want children to become literate in the standard language, then we have to provide the facilities and the means to do it. Banning the home language is not the way to do this. Of course offering a good language programme is a question of money and resources, and clearly there is not enough money for this kind of thing. But "integration" (another favourite word in this debate) is a two-way process. And the majority language has to come from the majority. Discouraging the minority language is actually irrelevant in this process, and also symbolically de-values this community's language.
It just made me think that there are some forms of bilingualism that are seen very positively (like my own), and others that are seen quite negatively (for example in migrant contexts). Schools in the UK, for example, offer French or German as a foreign language, rather than languages that are actually spoken in the community (say Urdu or Polish). So there is a definite ranking of languages in order of perceived value or utility. Some forms of bilingualism are seen as really advantageous, whilst others are seen as harmful and hindering successful "integration".
Saturday, 21 January 2012
The "Equal competence" issue
I don't think I have ever met a bilingual who feels equally competent or native-like in all their languages, indeed, most people I know tend to be quite apologetic about how "bad" or "rusty" or "childlike" one of their languages is. This is definitely the case for me with my Hungarian. For years I felt slightly embarrassed that my Hungarian wasn't better, that I can't really spell (even though Hungarians pride themselves in having such a phonetic spelling system... (but, for any Hungarians out there, why "biztos" and not "bisztos"?))
So why are we so apologetic? Again, there is this underlying expectation that a true bilingual should be the sum of two monolinguals. You shouldn't be able to tell that they are not really from a particular place. (This mainly applies to the non-dominant language, as bilinguals tend to feel they are as native-like as monolinguals in their dominant languages.) It took me a while to accept that my Hungarian is pretty amazing considering that it is my non-dominant language: I have never lived there, and have never gone to school or studied there, I only ever spoke it with my father, and on holiday.
And this brings me to the next point: literacy skills versus language competence. In the Western world the notion of language competence is intrinsically linked to that of literacy skills. When people in the UK say to me that they are not very good at "language", they usually mean spelling or knowledge of formal grammar. Yet worldwide there are many more languages without writing systems than there are ones with writing systems. Yet surely we would never think of these speakers as somehow not being 'native speakers' of their particular languages. And still the fact that I am not really literate in Hungarian makes me feel like I am not really a native speaker, I'm not really Hungarian.
And that brings me to the next point: there seems to be this idea that "language" is somehow static; our native language is something we acquire as children and this language is ours for the rest of our lives. But we know that immigrants who have not used their native language in a long time can struggle when they have to use it again. We also know that language use changes all the time. We use words and constructions today that weren't around five or ten years ago. (Famously, even Queen Elizabeth's accent has changed over the past 50 years!) People move to an area with a different dialect, and find that they struggle to communicate. But crucially, they will adapt their language use accordingly and learn to communicate in the new setting.
So it is worth reminding ourselves that there actually is no such thing as language. There are only speakers. Native speakers are confident communicators in their speech communities. Bilinguals are no different. They are also confident communicators in their speech communities. But their speech communities differ (perhaps only slightly) from those of monolinguals. Therefore it is not surprising that there will be differences in their language use, and that this will be most pronounced (or perhaps only actually noticeable) in their non-dominant language.
So why are we so apologetic? Again, there is this underlying expectation that a true bilingual should be the sum of two monolinguals. You shouldn't be able to tell that they are not really from a particular place. (This mainly applies to the non-dominant language, as bilinguals tend to feel they are as native-like as monolinguals in their dominant languages.) It took me a while to accept that my Hungarian is pretty amazing considering that it is my non-dominant language: I have never lived there, and have never gone to school or studied there, I only ever spoke it with my father, and on holiday.
And this brings me to the next point: literacy skills versus language competence. In the Western world the notion of language competence is intrinsically linked to that of literacy skills. When people in the UK say to me that they are not very good at "language", they usually mean spelling or knowledge of formal grammar. Yet worldwide there are many more languages without writing systems than there are ones with writing systems. Yet surely we would never think of these speakers as somehow not being 'native speakers' of their particular languages. And still the fact that I am not really literate in Hungarian makes me feel like I am not really a native speaker, I'm not really Hungarian.
And that brings me to the next point: there seems to be this idea that "language" is somehow static; our native language is something we acquire as children and this language is ours for the rest of our lives. But we know that immigrants who have not used their native language in a long time can struggle when they have to use it again. We also know that language use changes all the time. We use words and constructions today that weren't around five or ten years ago. (Famously, even Queen Elizabeth's accent has changed over the past 50 years!) People move to an area with a different dialect, and find that they struggle to communicate. But crucially, they will adapt their language use accordingly and learn to communicate in the new setting.
So it is worth reminding ourselves that there actually is no such thing as language. There are only speakers. Native speakers are confident communicators in their speech communities. Bilinguals are no different. They are also confident communicators in their speech communities. But their speech communities differ (perhaps only slightly) from those of monolinguals. Therefore it is not surprising that there will be differences in their language use, and that this will be most pronounced (or perhaps only actually noticeable) in their non-dominant language.
Friday, 20 January 2012
Monolingual biases
I have often come across the assumption that bilingual children are slightly slower than monolingual children in acquiring language (whatever that actually means, i.e. are they later at speaking, but equally good at comprehension, or is there a delay in both?) In any case, our doctor said this to me when we brought our son in for check-up at 1 year old and asked whether he was producing any words yet (he wasn't!). We were told not to worry, bilingual kids often started speaking later but then quickly catch up with their peers. I have heard this also from friends, from other parents, from babysitters and nursery staff. I think I actually kind of believed this to be true as well, maybe because my son started speaking words slightly later than my friends' children. But then I thought, actually most of my friends' children are bilingual too, so why am I assuming that my son is slower because he is bilingual??
Surely we aren't dealing with any kind of "delay" caused by bilingualism, but just experiencing first hand the common variations found in speech development, just like there is variation in the rate of motor skill development, i.e. differences in the age a baby first rolls over, and first sits upright. (Not that it's a race, but my son was very fast with this stuff :) (Incidentally there seems to be another assumption that your baby will either be verbal or physically active...which is probably another myth).
Anyway, so I have looked into this a bit and in fact it seems that indeed there is no evidence to suggest that bilinguals have any kind of delay in lexical acquisition (i.e. learning words!). The perception that a bilingual child knows less words than a monolingual child comes from the simple fact that most observations are made in only one of the child's languages. If you observe my son at nursery (in an English setting, the language that he is receiving the least input in), he will most likely not say much at all! (I would actually love to be a fly on the wall and observe him at nursery, because I really don't know how much English he knows!)
A bilingual child may appear to know fewer words than a monolingual peer in one of their languages only. But if you look at both languages, no difference in word acquisition rates has been found. In fact, some studies suggest that bilinguals may actually have slightly higher word acquisition rates than monolinguals.
So yet again this shows that we have monolingual biases in our approach to bilingual children, and that it is never enough to consider just one of the child's languages or language settings in order to get an idea of how well he or she is doing.
As I mentioned in my last post, there are more bilinguals in the world than monolinguals, so by sheer majority, shouldn't we re-adress this bias, and study the effects of monolingualism on development, not the other way round?
Surely we aren't dealing with any kind of "delay" caused by bilingualism, but just experiencing first hand the common variations found in speech development, just like there is variation in the rate of motor skill development, i.e. differences in the age a baby first rolls over, and first sits upright. (Not that it's a race, but my son was very fast with this stuff :) (Incidentally there seems to be another assumption that your baby will either be verbal or physically active...which is probably another myth).
Anyway, so I have looked into this a bit and in fact it seems that indeed there is no evidence to suggest that bilinguals have any kind of delay in lexical acquisition (i.e. learning words!). The perception that a bilingual child knows less words than a monolingual child comes from the simple fact that most observations are made in only one of the child's languages. If you observe my son at nursery (in an English setting, the language that he is receiving the least input in), he will most likely not say much at all! (I would actually love to be a fly on the wall and observe him at nursery, because I really don't know how much English he knows!)
A bilingual child may appear to know fewer words than a monolingual peer in one of their languages only. But if you look at both languages, no difference in word acquisition rates has been found. In fact, some studies suggest that bilinguals may actually have slightly higher word acquisition rates than monolinguals.
So yet again this shows that we have monolingual biases in our approach to bilingual children, and that it is never enough to consider just one of the child's languages or language settings in order to get an idea of how well he or she is doing.
As I mentioned in my last post, there are more bilinguals in the world than monolinguals, so by sheer majority, shouldn't we re-adress this bias, and study the effects of monolingualism on development, not the other way round?
Thursday, 19 January 2012
A short hello!
I grew up in a multilingual family and now my son is also growing up with three languages. For me this is completely natural, the result both of migration and all my aunts and uncles marrying someone with a different language background, and now my generation is doing the same. I grew up with German and Hungarian, and later English. My cousins are Hungarian/Dutch, Hungarian/German, German/Finnish and German/English. And now my partner is Russian and one of my cousins is married to a Mexican woman. So more languages are coming in all the time, and we welcome them!!
It never occurred to me that this might seem unusual to others who come from more monolingual families. Since having my son, I have met many couples who are forming a bilingual family for the first time, (i.e. both partners come from monolingual families, but have started a family with someone from another country, or have both moved to the UK and are now experiencing their children acquiring English as well as their own language). I am often being asked for advice on how to raise a child bilingually, and this has made me reflect more on what it means to have had more than one language from early on.
I therefore decided to start to write this blog on my life with many languages. I have realised that for many people here in the UK, my language situation appears far from natural, and that I am often perceived as fascinating and quite exotic! I often get asked, for example, whether I feel confused about my "identity" or whether my son is "confused" because of all the languages he is being "subjected to." My answer is always, why should it be any more confusing for a child to learn that people speak differently than for a child to learn that cats and dogs are alive, and chairs and tables are not, that some people are tall, and others short, female and male, black, brown, white and so on and so forth. The reason we think of several languages as "confusing" for a child, is because we view the situation from a (monolingual) adult perspective. We are no longer confused by the fact that chairs are not alive, but languages confuse us, therefore they must be confusing!
But they really are not.
As to my identity, I really don't feel schizophrenic or uprooted. I am not somehow torn between two (or three?) places, and two languages. Maybe this is due to the fact that I have always been surrounded by multi-linguals so I don't feel that different from anybody else. There is this common misconception that a bilingual is the sum of two monolinguals, who is equally at home in both languages, and therefore equally not really at home in either.
I will write more about the myth of a "balanced" bilingual, i.e. that someone who is bilingual is equally competent and equally at home in both languages. This is completely context dependent, and I think it is quite unlikely for someone to have two identical contexts for both their languages. Most likely, a bilingual will use one language at home, and one at school, or one with friends and one with the family. Therefore the relative competencies will be different. But their language use is completely adequate for their needs. Therefore their languages are far from "deficient" which is another common misconception about bilinguals. But more of that later.
Another comment I get very often is that I must be very "clever" because I know so many languages, and that people wish they had had the upbringing I had, because it is such an advantage learning a language "for free" so to speak, and not having to work at it in some tedious language classroom. I really don't think I am "clever" and I would encourage anyone to try and pick up another language because it really is possible, even in adulthood!
So I would really like to use this blog to dispel some of these common myths of what it is like to grow up and live bilingually, and also to encourage others to join me in this world! I will also blog about the kinds of research that is happening into bilingualism, and the lessons we can learn from that.
In the mean time, I will leave you with the fact that there are more bilinguals worldwide than monolinguals. So if you join them, you are in good company!
It never occurred to me that this might seem unusual to others who come from more monolingual families. Since having my son, I have met many couples who are forming a bilingual family for the first time, (i.e. both partners come from monolingual families, but have started a family with someone from another country, or have both moved to the UK and are now experiencing their children acquiring English as well as their own language). I am often being asked for advice on how to raise a child bilingually, and this has made me reflect more on what it means to have had more than one language from early on.
I therefore decided to start to write this blog on my life with many languages. I have realised that for many people here in the UK, my language situation appears far from natural, and that I am often perceived as fascinating and quite exotic! I often get asked, for example, whether I feel confused about my "identity" or whether my son is "confused" because of all the languages he is being "subjected to." My answer is always, why should it be any more confusing for a child to learn that people speak differently than for a child to learn that cats and dogs are alive, and chairs and tables are not, that some people are tall, and others short, female and male, black, brown, white and so on and so forth. The reason we think of several languages as "confusing" for a child, is because we view the situation from a (monolingual) adult perspective. We are no longer confused by the fact that chairs are not alive, but languages confuse us, therefore they must be confusing!
But they really are not.
As to my identity, I really don't feel schizophrenic or uprooted. I am not somehow torn between two (or three?) places, and two languages. Maybe this is due to the fact that I have always been surrounded by multi-linguals so I don't feel that different from anybody else. There is this common misconception that a bilingual is the sum of two monolinguals, who is equally at home in both languages, and therefore equally not really at home in either.
I will write more about the myth of a "balanced" bilingual, i.e. that someone who is bilingual is equally competent and equally at home in both languages. This is completely context dependent, and I think it is quite unlikely for someone to have two identical contexts for both their languages. Most likely, a bilingual will use one language at home, and one at school, or one with friends and one with the family. Therefore the relative competencies will be different. But their language use is completely adequate for their needs. Therefore their languages are far from "deficient" which is another common misconception about bilinguals. But more of that later.
Another comment I get very often is that I must be very "clever" because I know so many languages, and that people wish they had had the upbringing I had, because it is such an advantage learning a language "for free" so to speak, and not having to work at it in some tedious language classroom. I really don't think I am "clever" and I would encourage anyone to try and pick up another language because it really is possible, even in adulthood!
So I would really like to use this blog to dispel some of these common myths of what it is like to grow up and live bilingually, and also to encourage others to join me in this world! I will also blog about the kinds of research that is happening into bilingualism, and the lessons we can learn from that.
In the mean time, I will leave you with the fact that there are more bilinguals worldwide than monolinguals. So if you join them, you are in good company!
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